In a securities market, shares of stock in corporations (and options thereon), commodity futures (and options thereon), currencies and the like are traded over a common system or exchange. Other traded items can include, but are not limited to, indices and mutual funds. For simplicity, however, the following discussion will be limited to the purchase and sale of corporate stock. Within the exchange, traders buy and sell securities using bids and offers (also referred to as asks). More specifically, market makers who are selling securities transmit “offers” (or prices) and volumes (or associated volumes) at which they will sell various securities, and market makers who are buying securities transmit “bids” (or prices) and volumes (or associated volumes) at which they will buy various securities. Sellers attempt to sell at the highest possible price and buyers attempt to buy at the lowest possible price. The “inside market” represents the best price for sellers and buyers and respectively is comprised of the lowest ask (also known as the inside ask price or level 1 ask) and the highest bid (also known as the inside bid price or level 1 bid).
To maximize the profit taken from the securities market, traders would like certain information to determine what moment is advantageous to sell or buy a particular security. Traditionally, traders have tracked information derived from the “floor” of exchanges such as the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), the National Association of Securities Dealers (NASDAQ), the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and the like. This information can be transmitted electronically in near real time (i.e., almost simultaneously with actual market activity) to computer workstations for traders to view and analyze.
The information presently available to traders includes “level 1” information and “level 2” information. Level 1 information for a particular security typically includes, but may not be limited to, the current trade value (i.e., last trade value), the current trade volume, the total volume of shares traded during the trading session, the price to earnings (P/E) ratio, the previous trading day's closing value, the present day's opening value, the high and low values for the day and for the previous 52 weeks, the change from the prior closing value, the lowest ask (inside ask), the highest bid (inside bid), the earnings per share, the market capitalization, the dividend paid per share, the dividend yield, news items and articles, and so forth. Also available are records of historical performance, which can be displayed graphically on a trade by trade basis or over periods of time ranging from fractions of seconds to years. Also available are statistics for an entire exchange, such as total volume of shares traded and statistics for calculated market indices, such as the Dow-Jones Industrial Average (“The DOW”), the NASDAQ Composite, the Standard and Poor's 500 (“S&P 500”), the Russell 2000, sector indices, etc.
Level 2 information for a particular security typically includes each market maker having an open (or active) bid or ask, the time when the bid or ask was placed (also referred to respectively as bid time and ask time), size of the bid or ask (i.e., number of shares, often reported in lots of 100) and price of the ask or bid.
Many traders are interested in short term upward or downward price movements for selected securities. Predicting upward and downward price movement is often carried out by observing level 2 information for trends made by market makers as they offer and bid shares of various securities. Typically, level 2 information for one to three securities will be displayed on a computer monitor and this information is intently watched by the trader. The number of securities an individual can track in this manner is limited by the memory and cognitive ability of the individual to assimilate up to tens or hundreds of dynamically updated items of information per security per second. As a result, most traders can only effectively track one security at a time. More skilled traders may be able to track several securities at a time. Nevertheless, this technique is physically and mentally taxing on the trader. In addition, while a trader is tracking one or two securities, a purchase or sell opportunity for a different, untracked security may have been missed.
At least one attempt to automate the analysis of level 2 information has been made. As discussed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,297,032, market depth for a watch list of securities is displayed by identifying the total number of market makers on the inside market for respective bid and offer quotes for each watch list security along with arrows to indicate whether the number of market makers at these prices is increasing, staying the same or decreasing. However, this system does not provide adequate information for a trader to make a decision as to the appropriateness of purchasing or selling a particular security.
Accordingly, there exists a need in the art for a more sophisticated securities and market maker activity tracking system than the prior art provides.